Project Warlock II News — Road to Chapter 2 – Part 8: Playtest Summary
Go to Source
Hey Warlocks!
The road to Chapter 2 continues, and we are back to share another update on the preparation for its release. Our team is analyzing the feedback shared by a group of players who had a chance to test Urd’s adventure in its entirety.
First-hand impressions gathered from players in the last phase of development will help us polish the overall experience when it comes to weapon performance, spell casting, enemy behavior, level design, character progression and more.
Let’s break it down in our playtest summary!
During 4 days of playtesting all of the 12 levels of Chapter 2 you shared over 1200 comments on various aspects of the game. Below, you can learn more about how it relates to the main pillars of Chapter 2 of Project Warlock II.
As the Project Warlock community was always very perceptive about different aspects of weaponry we decided to let our playtesters try out the full arsenal available for fiery Urd.
Some of you pointed out that certain weapons feel weak without any perks, but they may be overpowered when fully upgraded. Right now our goal is to put additional work into balancing this aspect of the combat system. Among a few other changes, we plan to buff the base version of Scoped Pistol, reduce the ammo capacity of SMG, or introduce more variants of the grenade via Wargression upgrades.
We also received feedback regarding Urd’s dagger. “Dagger Dash” skill will be redesigned and now it will only work if grounded. We also want to reduce the time of the blade throws with an additional upgrade and enhance the visual effects of “Dagger Storm”.
Urd is a magic caster first, and gun user second which is reflected in her arsenal and separates her toolset from that of the more trigger happy Palmer. Your experience with a full set of magic abilities in Chapter 2 helped us list a few areas requiring some changes.
Utilizing Spell Book on the battlefield can make a huge difference and we’ve put a lot of effort into making it as satisfying to use as possible. Some of the changes will be focusing on the animations, cooldowns of spell casting, or in general, the performance of certain spell types.
We would like to also address your suggestions regarding the Crystal Sentry. Changes that we plan to implement relate to its spawning and targeting enemies. In addition, we want to disable friendly fire against our magical companion and improve its pathing.
We also plan to boost Urd’s witchcraft a lot to make it more appealing to use. Area of Effect and damage outputs will all be buffed to a point where magic feels really powerful to use.
Our team is also working on improving the Wargression system based on the information collected from our Discord. Many playtesters didn’t stop on a single playthrough which helped us learn more about different outcomes for upgrade categories or effectiveness of perk parameters.
Our aim is to tweak certain perks in terms of additional damage, duration of upgrade effects or the frequency of accessing particular types of upgrades. Based on your experience with the Luck perks and Token rerolls, we decided to change its basic rules to provide reasonable proportions in using this system.
More changes we consider for character progression relate to the way of acquiring upgrade tokens or even implementing the new perk category.
Our playtests let all the participants visit the whole 12 levels of the treacherous brutalist west. Giving you a chance to lurk in every nook and cranny of each location in Chapter 2 allowed us to plan more improvements.
First of all, we were able to learn more about your reactions when it comes to navigating the Chapter 2 levels. Based on your comments, we can put some final touches to the overall guidance of the player through the different segments of the game’s locations.
We also received a lot of feedback regarding enemy spawn placements and overall amount of monsters wandering about in given areas of maps. Let’s just say repopulation of certain areas seems in order with the aim to serve you a stronger adrenaline rush where it’s too quiet, or give you a little bit more space where it feels right to do so.
Killing hordes of terrifying foes is Warlocks’ bread and butter so we need to make sure that your encounters with all sorts of deadly creatures are satisfying.
The overall reception of the enemies of Chapter 2 was very positive. Our team put a lot of effort into creating an extensive roster of grotesque foes and we can clearly see that it was appreciated by players.
Many of our playtesters took their time and effort to share with us the information about the reactions of enemies in particular situations and performance of certain weapons against a given type of foes. Feedback we received led us to plan changes such as additional animations for dodging (Demonface), the priority of the weapon chosen for the attack (Elf Shaman), damage dealt by special attacks (Vamps), amount of health points (Turboshambler), and more.
Most importantly Wraith and Demonface will be adjusted, where Wraith’s resistances will be more visually represented, and their behavior will be unique among other monsters – they will be the only monsters to have the possibility to move and attack simultaneously. Also, Wraith will be nerfed when it comes to his attack interval and damage output.
Another crucial point, which the playtester raised are boss fights. We’ll be thinking of ways to make sure you have the most fun possible during those encounters and we’ll be taking another look to see what we can do about the bosses placement on the levels as well as their healthpools and overall difficulty.
That’s all for today’s entry on Chapter 2. Our team will be now working hard on implementing various changes based on playtesters impressions in order to polish game systems and deliver a thrilling experience on the release.
Also – please keep in mind that the Chapter 2 demo is available to play on Steam and GOG and your feedback is always appreciated.
See you in the next update!
Follow Project Warlock on Twitter Follow Retrovibe on Twitter
Visit Retrovibe Publisher Page